Friday, March 28, 2008

Contest Winners

Sorry this took so long, but I'm finally catching up. [laugh/flail] The winners of my chunk of the Pay It Forward contest are:

Shauna and Ello!

Each of you get to pick one of the following prizes:

1. Support New Writers -- two books by new writers. That is, writers whose first commercially published book came out one year or less ago, as of 15 March 2008. Mass market paperbacks or equivalent only, please.

2. Support Electronic Publishing -- a $15 gift certificate to Fictionwise, one of the major sellers of electronic books.

3. Try Something New -- two books from two writers whose work you've never read before. Try to make at least one of them in a genre you've never read before. You're not paying, so experiment! Mass market paperbacks or equivalent only, please.

It's not a first-come, first-served; if you both pick the same one, that's cool.

Then, you each need to run this contest in your own blog. You don't have to do it exactly the same way I did -- you can make people do something different, or just enter by commenting if you want.

I love novels by new authors - now how do I know who to choose though? Is there a list you want us to work from? Or a bunch you would recommend or do we look for a new author ourselves and let you know?

Now when I do my version of the contest, can I actually make people do a little work for it? Not anything major, make me laugh or something like that?

Ello - if you have a couple of writers you've always wanted to try but never got around to, that'd be cool. If you want recommendations, I can do that too. :)

Jo Beverley absolutely rocks historical romance. Her two best known series are Regency and Georgian, but she's also written some medievals. Laura Kinsale did a lot of different things in romance, like an overweight heroine way before there was a subgenre for them, and a slim, wiry hero in another one when the fashion was for body-builder types. (Just ignore the Fabio on the cover. [shudder] Their insistence on putting him on all her covers, whether he matched the character type or not, was one of the reasons she left Avon.) And Laney Cairo is my favorite writer, bar none, for m/m; I highly recommend Bad Case of Loving You, about a doctor and a med student. (Laney used to be a nurse and the hospital/medical matters are wonderfully realistic without being lecturey.)

I have a whole list of SF recs. Lois McMaster Bujold does wonderful characterizations and excellent worldbuilding. Steven Brust does a great series, with a couple of prequels (sorta) which are excellent pastiches of Dumas; I love reading The Phoenix Guard over and over just to listen to his dialogue. Sheri Tepper writes a lot of feminist SF, which I can actually get into because she doesn't make all the women wonderful and all the men jerks -- The Gate to Women's Country does feminist philosophy wonderfully well. David Weber does great space opera, with a female protag I really like, and some cool aliens. David Brin does wonderful Aliens, as well as more familiar species which have been uplifted to intellengence, but are still themselves and not just weird looking humans. Niven and Pournelle together have done some great large-scale SF epic stories, taking place on earth but dealing with world- or society-changing developments; Lucifer's Hammer is probably their best known, but my favorite is Oath of Fealty.Steven Barnes wrote Dream Park with Niven, a cool story about a live roleplaying game in a park which uses sets and actors and holograms to make the adventure feel real. Barnes has also written some good solo stuff. Mike Resnick does excellent SF fables, which are hard to explain -- they have a legendary or fabular feel, but take place in the far future, on far-flung planets. My favorite of his is Santiago, and another excellent one is Ivory.Octavia Butler wrote some great character stories; my favorite so far is The Parable of the Sower; it's a bit more spiritual than I'm usually into, being an atheist and all that ;) but she's an excellent writer and made it work for me. Nancy Kress is a hard SF writer who works mainly in biology rather than the more traditional physics and mechanics and such; she became known for Beggars in Spain, a book about people who were genetically manipulated to never sleep, and the effect that had on them and society. It sounds weird but it's really good. :) Harlan Ellison and Orson Scott Card both write wonderful short stories; any of their collections would be great if you're into shorts.

Let's see, what else? Monica Ferris writes a fun mystery series centered around a needlework shop; if you're at all into needlework and mysteries, you'd probably like it. :) She also wrote an earlier mystery series under the name Mary Monica Pulver where the detective was actually a police detective, who was also a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism. The SCA is only featured in one of the books, but it's very cool if you are or were in the Society. The detective's wife owns a horse farm and one of the books takes place at a horse show; I've never been hugely into horses, but I found this book interesting for the setting as well as the mystery itself.

Orson Scott Card again, this time with a horror story, sort of. The original shorter version was a sort of a ghost story, as you might tell around a campfire, and he expanded it into a novel. It's very matter-of-fact, and not even all that scary until the very end. It's called The Lost Boys if you're interested.

Anything sound interesting...? :D If not, that's cool -- you can get recs from someone else if you're not into any of my favorite genres.

About Me

My name is Angie and I'm a writer living in Seattle, WA with my husband. I publish science fiction, fantasy and crime stories under Angela Penrose, and romance and erotica under Angela Benedetti. I pretty much live at the computer, either writing or online or both. My schedule is chaotically variable, so I might be awake or asleep at any given moment. It's not all bad; writing at 2am when it's quiet is actually pretty cool.